Cyber Resilience: A High Priority

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digitalisation and automation in the pharma sector. But, as the risk landscape of the pharma industry is huge it also needs to build better resilience and resistance to cyber-attacks on a war footing

- Lakshmi Priya Nair

The upheaval wreaked by the COVID-19 pandemic has ush-ered sweeping digital and technological transformations across businesses in its wake. But, it has also amplified the threat of data breaches and cyber-attacks.

Cybersecurity firm, McAfee recently reported a “605 per cent increase in coronavirus-related cyber disruptions globally.” Companies engaged in research, science, and technology were the key targets, as per the report. Between July and September 2020, companies witnessed a 19 per cent rise in such attacks.

As Charlotte Dunlap, Principal Analyst at GlobalData, observes, “In a pandemic that is prompting accelerated digitisation, having integrated monitoring and observability cloud services are crucial to application lifecycle management for providing insight to app performance, efficiencies, and governance/security. Alongside the need to fast-track business transformations comes the risk of software bugs, security breaches, and performance bottlenecks.”

A mounting menace

The pharma sector, with a central role to play in the world’s response against the pandemic, has been forced to innovate in ways unprecedented. This, in, turn, has accelerated digitalisation and automation in the industry. But, it also increased its susceptibility to cyber-attacks. Pharma and life sciences have seen a spate of cyber-attacks since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.